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The Future of Artificial Intelligence – AI’s Next Brain Wave

New research in artificial intelligence could lay the groundwork for computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them. Part four in The Future Of Software series.

Artificial intelligence, a field that has tantalized social scientists and high-tech researchers since the dawn of the computer industry, had lost its sex appeal by the start of the last decade. After a speculative boom in the ’80s, attempts to encode humanlike intelligence into systems that could categorize concepts and relate them to each other didn’t really pan out, and "expert systems" packed with rules derived from human authorities couldn’t translate their expertise into areas beyond the subject matter for which they were programmed. Even when Deep Blue, an IBM chess-playing computer that could evaluate some 200 million board positions per second, defeated grand master Gary Kasparov in 1997, the triumph didn’t lead to an artificial-intelligence renaissance.

Now a new generation of researchers hopes to rekindle interest in AI. Faster and cheaper computer processing power, memory, and storage, and the rise of statistical techniques for analyzing speech, handwriting, and the structure of written texts, are helping spur new developments, as is the willingness of today’s practitioners to trade perfection for practical solutions to everyday problems. Researchers are building AI-inspired user interfaces, systems that can perform calculations or suggest passages of text in anticipation of what users will need, and software that tries to mirror people’s memories to help them find information amid digital clutter. Much of the research employs Bayesian statistics, a branch of mathematics that tries to factor in common beliefs and discount surprising results in the face of contrary historical knowledge. Some of the new AI research also falls into an emerging niche of computer science: the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

By Aaron Ricadela
InformationWeek

Full Story: http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161501161

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